AngryParsley comments on Any sufficiently advanced wisdom is indistinguishable from bullshit - Less Wrong

7 Post author: Shalmanese 20 December 2009 10:09AM

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Comment author: AngryParsley 20 December 2009 11:05:21AM *  0 points [-]

I think that statement is true only for time-constrained arguments. It takes time to research and understand the prerequisites to any "advanced wisdom," so to speak. Likewise, it takes time to understand the flaws in untrue things, and to notice your own biases. Finally, even if you understand the evidence and arguments leading up to some great insight, it takes time to fully understand the ramifications of the idea. If you're time-constrained like in your example, your past self simply can't process everything fast enough and the absurdity heuristic wins.

The one positive thing this law has lead me to is a much higher tolerance for bullshit. I'm no longer so quick to dismiss ideas which, to me, seem obvious bullshit.

This is where I have to disagree with you. There are plenty of ways to quickly and accurately rule out most incorrect beliefs without accidentally ruling out correct beliefs. Many of them are mentioned on this site.

Comment author: Shalmanese 21 December 2009 03:25:01AM 2 points [-]

If you think Christians are Christians (to pick an arbitrary example) because of time constraints, then you're in for a rude shock.

Comment author: AngryParsley 21 December 2009 08:20:36AM 3 points [-]

Actually, I do think the reason a lot of Christians are Christians is because it takes a lot of time for someone else to deconvert them.

To deconvert a religious person with a high school education, you usually need to touch on a lot of topics: the scientific method, beliefs and evidence, anthropics, biology, evolution, the problem of evil, cosmology, reductionism, and cognitive biases. It takes time for people to explain and comprehend all these things.

Comment author: magfrump 21 December 2009 04:03:33AM 1 point [-]

Conjecture: the amount of time needed to escape the Christian paradigm is arbitrarily large (say, a year of concentrated effort) so Christians are Christians due to time constraints because they don't see being a Christian as an issue to put time into (reference to the post where Eliezer talked about robots lifting refrigerators and teacups or whatever goes here)

Comment author: Shalmanese 20 December 2009 02:15:15PM 1 point [-]

Note: The converse is not true. Not all bullshit looks like advanced wisdom.

Comment author: wedrifid 20 December 2009 02:33:35PM 0 points [-]

Does more advanced wisdom look like bullshit than bullshit looks like advanced wisdom? I doubt it. Bullshit is selected for appearances.

Comment author: AdeleneDawner 21 December 2009 04:22:21AM 1 point [-]

By the OP's definition of 'advanced wisdom', all advanced wisdom looks like bullshit, by definition.

There would be 3 broad sets that your discussions would fall in: Beliefs that you both mutually agree on, Beliefs that you are able to convince your past-self through reason and Beliefs which make the past-self regard your future-self as being actively stupid for holding. It's this third category which I'm going to term Advanced Wisdom.

Comment author: wedrifid 21 December 2009 05:34:46AM 2 points [-]

By the OP's definition of 'advanced wisdom', all advanced wisdom looks like bullshit, by definition.

That (re)definition makes Shalmanese's third law tautological rather than clearly false. That's fine, so long as no attempt is made to draw any conclusions about, well, actual advanced wisdom.